Los Angeles (8 page)

My mother had been so glamorous once, an ice blonde with a French accent. Tall, thin, a runway model in Zurich and Paris in
the late sixties, a fixture in the society pages, the kind of girl who belonged in the passenger seat of a Fiat Spider, a
scarf around her neck, long legs, a gamine. She’d made one movie, met my father, then retired. Originally she had straight
hair, frosty blond, but at some point in the seventies, she’d had it styled in a Farrah Fawcett cascade, which became the
way she wore it all the way through the eighties, even into the nineties. At the first sign of wrinkles, she started visiting
Dr. Jerome Phelps, a famous plastic surgeon and a plastic surgeon to the famous, and the skin on her face kept getting tighter
and tighter, weirder and weirder. She’d had her cheekbones redone, her lips injected with collagen, the bags removed from
under her eyes, her ass tightened, her breasts lifted, her hair dyed, her thighs lipoed… I couldn’t stand her anymore, was
the truth. In all honesty, I hated what my mother had become. As far as I was concerned, Monique Veronchek had ceased to be
a person a very long time ago.

______

Things were blurry now, but a little darker at least.

Pink, in any event.

I sat in the strip mall parking lot, wearing my mother’s prescription lenses, and waited futilely for the aura to fade. It
shimmered, flickered, sparkled, flashed. Sometimes, very rarely, the headache didn’t arrive, or the aura turned out to be
a trick of the eye. It was hard to tell right now which way it would go. I was still blind, but fuck it, I thought.

I turned the ignition and drove defiantly toward my destination, this time off the freeway, to Orange Blossom Boulevard, nearly
sightless from the aura and my mother’s ridiculous rose-colored glasses, to the address of someone named Jessica Teagarden.

As soon as I pulled onto that street, however, I stopped the Cadillac at the curb, swung the door open, and puked into the
clean concrete gutter. The vomit was gelatinous, formerly Stouffer’s spaghetti with meatballs, which I didn’t remember eating,
for some reason, and which didn’t contain enough liquid because I had been overly medicating and drinking too much and was
as dehydrated as a spoonful of Tang.

I was lucky not to be coughing up orange dust.

The nausea phase had come suddenly, like an invisible hand had squeezed my stomach from the inside, and the whole contents
of my stomach were unceremoniously squirted onto the avenue. Disgusting as this may sound, this was a good thing, because
it meant the overall migraine experience would probably be short-lived. Usually at the onset of the vomiting, the visual disturbances
clear away like clouds over Zuma Beach. So when I lifted my head and wiped my face on the front of my shirt, the blindness
lifted, too. I pushed my mother’s glasses onto my forehead, waiting for the next gush of vomit to rise, and looked around
with clear eyes.

This was a much better neighborhood than mine. There were a couple of kids playing Wiffle ball on the lawn across the street;
an orange-and-purple FedEx truck was making its round of deliveries; an old woman power-walked by my car, her gray head bobbing
like a pigeon’s. No one said a word. I thought the nausea had passed for a moment, and I almost got out of the car, but then
I felt it again, that pressure rising up from deep inside me, and I retched for a full five minutes more, coughing and gagging
and drooling like an animal.

Eventually, though, it stopped, and I was able to pull my head back in, wipe my face on my shirt once more, and look around
for the exact address. There are usually a few moments of peace, relatively speaking, after I throw up, before the pain behind
my eye starts to build, and I wanted to take full advantage.

I took a deep breath, locating the number above a door.

The house was a stucco duplex with a wide, manicured front lawn, a garden of decorative cacti, an old palm tree providing
a finger of shade across the facade. I wondered why Angela had moved away from a place like this, if she had actually lived
here, that is. It was so much nicer than my neighborhood. There were wild palms decorating the lawns, as well as two gigantic
willows across the street, their long, whiplike tendrils tickling the dry grass in the hot Santa Monica breeze. I could even
see a set of red swings with a slide and seesaw around the side yard. I pulled up without closing the door, parked the Cadillac
in front of the walkway, and got out, pushing Mom’s pink-tinted octagonals back down over my eyes to filter the garish light.
From where I stood, it didn’t seem like anyone was home. I walked across the lawn, stepped up to the front door, and noticed
a pile of mail in front of it. I knelt down to sift through, finding mostly catalogs like Victoria’s Secret, Williams-Sonoma,
and Sharper Image, some of which were addressed to Occupant or Current Resident, others specifically to Jessica Tea-garden.

Was that really her name?

And if it was, why had she told me her name was Angela?

There were only a few envelopes, one electricity bill, a couple of solicitations, and one thick envelope without a return
address. It was the same shade of blue and addressed in the same blocky handwriting as the empty one I found in Angela’s trash
back home, the word
Jessica
emblazoned across it in letters a half inch high. It occurred to me that she probably had received the other blue envelope
at this address, too, and had brought it with her, along with her old utility bills, to the apartment in West Hollywood. Whatever
it contained, I knew, had something to do with her old life.

Furtively, I slipped the blue envelope into my pocket.

“Are you stealing peoples mail?”

I turned around to see a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, with an oddly shaped face. I gave him what I hoped would appear
to be a friendly smile but probably turned out to be the usual grimace. “I was looking for Angela,” I answered. Then I corrected
myself, saying, “I mean, Jessica… Ms. Teagarden.”

“She used to be our next-door neighbor,” the boy announced. He had five or six heavy library books under his arm, plus a full
backpack. “But she moved away.”

“Oh.” I stood up.

“No one lives there now.”

“Really?”

“Not yet. I was hoping for some kids.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans without dropping his books and fished out a
single key on a shoe lace. “My moms not home,” he said. “She’ll be back around twelve-thirty.”

“She’s at work?”

The boy smiled a bored, completely adult smile.

“Did you know her?”

He arched a single eyebrow and said this like a fifty-year-old man: “Are you referring to Jessica Teagarden?” He had the kind
of cheekbones that made his eyes and nose seem almost concave.

I reached in my side pocket for the photo I had grabbed before I left the apartment, thinking I might at least be able to
verify her identity. “Is this her?” In the picture, Angela half-sneered, half-smiled, holding that middle finger directly
up to the lens. I could feel the migraine growing now, a piercing needle stabbing the back of my eye, the point touching the
interior of my pupil.

The boy examined it, and his own gray eyes narrowed. “That’s her, I guess… well, maybe… but why is she doing that?”

The inappropriateness of showing a ten-year-old kid a photograph of a half-dressed woman extending the fuck-you finger suddenly
dawned on me. “That sure is a lot of books you have there,” I said, slipping the picture back into my pocket.

“Yeah, well,” he said, “I just came back from the library because I’m doing a report.”

“What on?”

“The gecko.”

“Interesting,” I nodded appreciatively. “The gecko.”

He dropped his books onto the ground. “Do you want to hear it?”

I blinked.

He turned his satellite-shaped face toward the sky, keeping his eyes wide. They watered, absorbing the light, then started
to flicker. I was about to tell him it wasn’t a good idea to stare into the sun, when he began speaking in a low voice, his
lids half-closed.
“They are found in tropical regions all over the world,”
he said.
“Nocturnal, hiding in cool shadows during the day and foraging
for insects at night, the gecko frequently makes his or her home in high tree branches… suction cups which can enable the gecko
to walk across a smooth ceiling as if he is walking across the floor.”
Suddenly, his eyelids fluttered wildly.

“Are you all right?”

He enunciated every syllable like a television voice-over actor. His face twitched, as though he were in the middle of a seizure.
“A highly developed sense of hearing… relatively unique in their ability to chirp or click. In fact, the very name gecko is
believed to be a derivative of a Malay word which…”

Now he paused, but his eyes kept pulsating.

“Hey!” I shouted.

He stopped, breathing heavily. The boy’s eyes were still open, but his lips were trembling and he seemed to have descended
into some sort of fugue.

I couldn’t help but look around, thinking I might need to find some help. I even considered running back to the car and speeding
away. “Are you… are you all right?” I asked again.

Thankfully, the boy coughed convulsively, and when he looked up, his eyes were clear. “What do you mean?” he asked. He seemed
to have come to.

“You were… your eyelids were flickering, and you seemed to be… I don’t know —”

He smiled hugely. “Oh, that’s just what it’s like when I’m
remembering.
” He broke into an unselfconscious, high-pitched giggle, saying proudly, “That wasn’t really my report. That was from the
Discovery Channel.”

“From TV?”

“I have an audiographic memory,” he announced.

I didn’t know what to say. “A… what?”

“
Audiographic.
That means I can remember everything I hear.”

“Everything?”

“Absolutely everything,” he answered. “And once it starts, it’s kind of hard to turn it off.”

“Do you remember anything about Angela… I mean, about Jessica?”

“Were you her boyfriend?”

I had to close my eyes. The light was killing me. “Yeah, I was… I mean… I am.”

“I don’t usually remember stuff like that. I have to care about it at least a little bit.”

My head was starting to throb, the migraine assembling its powers, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. “Well,” I said,
“I really need to talk to her.”

“You could ask my mom.” He indicated the living room, an oasis of cool shadow. “She’ll be home pretty soon, and you could
wait inside.”

I hesitated, thinking of the photo I had shown him, and wondered if the kid would launch into another science report. “You
probably shouldn’t invite strangers into your house.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look very dangerous.” Then he pointed to my chest. “And you could use our bathroom to rinse
the throw-up off your shirt.”

I looked down. The front of my shirt was striped with greenish bile and orangey red smears of regurgitated spaghetti sauce.

Fantastic.

The boy opened the door for me all the way.

The interior had that afternoon feeling of no one being home. There was that stillness, a summer quiet. Motes of dust floated
in the heavy air, revealing shafts of thick yellow that burned through the wooden blinds and cast hard zebra stripes of shadow
across the floor. That film crew had been here before me to set up the scene, it seemed, the same one that had lit the parking
lot yesterday. I pictured the gaffers inside this little duplex, standing around with their alligator clips and rolls of colored
tape. I imagined that one of these walls was fake, concealing Universal’s entire lighting department.

“I’m Angel,” I said.

I was barely holding it together. In a few short moments, the course of the migraine had progressed from a slight stabbing
pain to the feeling of a needle piercing my eye to the sensation of a shard of broken glass cutting through the back of my
head.

“I’m Victor,” the boy said pointing. “Bathroom’s that way.”

“Thank you, Victor.” I stepped through a small hallway between the living room and kitchen and found a single toilet and sink
in a closet-size space. There was a flaming intensity slashing through my cerebral cortex now, my medulla oblongata throbbing,
the migraine coming on with full, merciless effect. I could feel it penetrating my frontal lobe like a surgeon’s scalpel.

Inside the little yellow room, I pushed my mother’s octagonal glasses up onto my head and examined my face in the mirror.
My skin was practically transparent, the veins beneath my skin pulsating like an alien’s. My eyes were even pinker, even more
infant-fleshlike than usual, and deeply bloodshot from my being awake for so long. I ran some cold water over my fingers and
placed them gently on my temples, trying to cool my boiling brain. This was the truly painful part of the migraine, and the
fact that I hadn’t passed out was actually a good sign. Things could only get better from here, I told myself.

There was a clean washcloth hanging on a silver hook, beige with a pattern of white stars, and I used it to wipe some of the
vomit off the front of my shirt. Then I rinsed it, flicked the light switch off, and sat down on the toilet, putting my head
in my hands and pressing the cloth over my sensitive eyelids.

I only wanted to think for a few seconds, to pull myself together.

I wondered again why Angela had left this neighborhood. This house was pretty nice, presumably the same as the one next door.
It was a much more pleasant community out here than West Hollywood, too, with the ocean just a few blocks away, and the willow
trees, and the well-cared-for lawns. If she lived next door, in a place just like this, why leave? Could it have been money?
I knew Angela made plenty at the Mask. And despite the crappiness of my neighborhood, my apartment building didn’t come at
the cheapest rent on earth. It occurred to me that maybe Angela didn’t fit in out here. Santa Monica is a daylight world,
a place for sun worshippers and surfers, extroverts and exhibitionists. Perhaps she felt more at home in the West Hollywood
world of darkness and paranoia.